2+2=5

Ars Electronica 2006
Simplicity - The Art of Complexity

view more pictures at my flickr (slideshow)

Simple, simplify, simplistic, and keep on going. To understand this year’s Ars Electronica theme “Simplicity – The Art of Complexity” was definitely not simple. It wasn’t simple for me, it wasn’t simple for Wolfgang Bednarzek, one of the festival’s organizer, it wasn’t simple for John Maeda, the MIT virtuous genius; simply, it wasn’t simple.

I’m a freshman, now I know it more than ever. The city of Linz, after being a place where weapons were produced during the Second World Word (and this was new information for me as well), is today, without a doubt, the meca of media art. And everyone I talk to migrates to the small town in a weird new media Zionism, year after year.

How can new technologies and art manifestations act as mediators to make us understand and handle better today’s ever-growing complexity? Is it possible to feel safe and comfortable, when more and more multi-thread realities stretch out beings and force us to question even our own identities? The complex festival program was willing to come up with some answers or at least to cast some light over such torments. The general feeling of the collective was that yes, complex systems can optimize and facilitate difficult tasks, making our lives easier. The example given by Eric Yeatman, professor at the Imperial College, illustrates quite well such moto. With a picture of a mailbox, Yeatman describes how the interface is: you but your letter through a hole, 3 days later, it appears on another hole, at someone’s house. Although it does seam simple, a robust infrastructure runs behind the process. You have mailmen, sorting machines, and transportation, everything invisible for us. So complexity remains invisible while usability is reduced to the simplest action. While we keep on pushing technology to mould around behaviours, the reality will remain human. However, he pointed out that the British Mail system is about to change the fees for different letter sizes, forcing people to choose the cheaper format, which happens to be the one that the sorting machine can handle better. In other words, we complicate our lives so the machine can have an easier life.

So, complexity should be hidden underneath the hood. Less is more. Or less is bore? Isn’t a life stripped out of chaos, sterilized of mistakes less exciting? Author Mark C. Taylor, in this book “Moment of Complexity”, is among the ones praising the new world of multiple faces. He states that it is when the grid structure gives place to a multi-node net structure is when human creativity is nourished the best. Here as well simplicity is not necessarily about order. In fact, many say randomness and serendipity are what make us spot great solutions in simple things, in the details. That was the one of the agreements during the first section of symposium. English product designer Sam Heckt listed oddity among one of his major rules, showing that the unexpected turns simple into greatness. Paola Antonelli, design curator of MoMA, added that the simplest object can bare multiple uses, and gave the iconic swiss knife as the example. However, it was Walter Bender, the runs the project “One Laptop per Child”, that traced the contrast within human attributes: although unique, complex and chaotic, the very things that make us human are simple: the capacity to learn (and teach), to express ourselves, and the desire to connect.

But comfort may be deceiving as well. If complexity is left for machines, as a prosthetic process, wouldn’t that makes us less capable of handling deeper issues? Steven Johnson, author of “Everything Bad is Good for You” says that today media brings complexity to the way we think, flashing before our eyes time-overlapping narratives, multi-character relationships, not to say the game culture, that forces us into a constant probing process inside complicated systems. But that is complexity in the process, and not in the argument, which is the overall critic over today’s media content. And would that be happening here at Ars Electronica? Are we pushing media art to complex systems that just handle simple questions? That would require a more detailed analysis over the different projects exhibited here (intended for a second article), but my overall impression is that fascination for new technologies is still a strong axis here. It is my belief that many projects here still do focus on a technocratic elite, and our delight with the man/machine relationship, leaving man/man aside.

I’m a freshman, and fresh perception has its ups and downs, as the festival does. Nevertheless, more than the organization (and that I will clap my hands to everyone backstage), I was impressed with the passion that new media disciples display around the city of Linz. It is multiple, complex and seducing. Having said that, hopefully, next year’s swarm with have another dot coming from Brazil.